Dessa
mouth full of pins and heart pumping gasoline
For the most part, Dessa had kept to herself. She preferred to watch the interactions of wolves from afar rather than insert herself. It seemed to long ago, when she had first begun her wayward explorations to Iromar. But she could still recall his face, the boy who she'd met along the outskirts of a land forbidden to her. Time had changed that, of course, and so too had her desires in life. There were not many in this world that knew her name, much less who she even was, and those she had met were typically chance encounters that she never interacted with again. Despite her fated ties to Cae, she'd not seen him in many moons. It was not he who sought her out, though, but another from her past. It seemed that the history was thick, despite how briefly they had met, some part of each of them had rooted itself in the other.

It was the slightest of sounds that caught her attention, the swiveling of her left ear stilling as it pricked towards the far side of the frozen surface that led out to her island. Slowly do her eyes turn towards the wolf who materializes through the haze of the midwinter day. From this distance he is but a silhouette, and Dessa observes him with the barest of interest. She only wants to assure he will not fall through the ice, his crawling pace enough to tell her he'd not made the cross before. Then again that was no surprise, as in the past week only her paw prints broke the surface of the snow in her secluded paradise. When he breached the bank and kicked away from the treacherous ice he turned towards the tree where she lounged.

Through the hanging branches of the willow does she watch him as he came ever closer. There is no tenseness to her, for she does not fear this nameless wraith that has intruded upon her quiet afternoon on the isle. Despite her tendency towards solitariness, she did not loath the company of others. The breeze, most unfortunately, worked against her, for even as the branches of the willow reach out to invite him within she is unable to catch his scent. So when the pale form of Malum moved between the tendrils that sheltered her Dessa's green-flecked honey eyes immediately locked with those of pale pink and jade. "The name I came with," she responds, as if it has not been three years since they had last met. The past rolled back and she could see the youth in his grown face, recognized the wolf who had first broken all her conceptions about the world. It was perhaps he who had first sparked that further desire to see the world through her own eyes rather than the stories of her parents and pack mates. She'd gone forth into the world and conceived her own ideas about the old grudges of the world that she lived in.

The look on his face, the way he seemed to hang on her name as he spoke it, gave him an air of appearing almost surprise to be alive, startled I was there. "Malum," she finally said, dipping her nose to him but not shifting more so than that to greet him. Almost absent mindedly does her attention turn to her paws as she begins to groom them, pink tongue running along them a few times before she does look to him again. She does not treat him with indifference, rather with the curious nature that was innately hers. Had he come here to play it safe? For now the roles seemed to be reversed, she in the comfort of her absolute element and he treading the proverbial border of what she claimed to be hers for this moment in time.

when they said you were past repair
iv. of elowen. by maddox. for cae. from everywhere.
i stitched you up, thread a needle with my hair